October Issue
McCombs Student Praises B-School Professors,
Course Work
Excerpted from article by Paul Burka, Texas Monthly
This excerpt comes from an article about UT called "Greatness Visible." To read the story in its entirety, pick up a copy of the October issue of Texas Monthly.
....Business is the most sought-after major on campus, and value-added has a lot to do with it: First, a student can acquire a skill that might actually lead to a job, and second, it's just an exciting place to be. "Professors will drop by at two in the morning to check with people who are working on a project," said senior Sean Paul, the president of the Undergraduate Business Council-an organization that advises the deans on issues affecting students. On the day I talked to him, Paul was ecstatic about U.S. News rankings that put the undergraduate business school in the top five programs in the country, up from seventh. "Our goal is to work with Wharton [Pennsylvania], Haas [Berkeley], Sloan [MIT], and NYU." He paused, and said in an emphatic way, "We know who our competition is."
Paul is pursuing a major in business while minoring in biology, and he intends to go to medical school. Why study business? "Because it has the most interesting work and the most enthusiastic students," he said. "We work on real projects that companies have worked on. In accounting, we reviewed a problem Nordstrom had. Their sales went up but their profits went down. We had to find what went wrong."
When he was at St. Joseph High School in Victoria, he was seriously considering attending NYU instead of UT. He didn't want to stay in Texas. He had no particular loyalties; his parents had moved from India to Chicago to Texas. He had the kind of résumé a business school would find irresistible: He started a business when he was fourteen, offering his services as a deejay at proms, parties, and senior citizens' centers, and earned more than $10,000 while in high school. He also won a state championship in tennis, ran cross-country, co-captained the basketball team, served as sophomore class president, and finished fourth in his graduating class. He waited until the last possible day before making up his mind to attend UT. Now he travels around the state recruiting for the business honors program.
"How's it going?" I asked.
"Oh, it's great," he said. "Everybody wants to be a Longhorn right now."
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